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Date: January 29, 2014 04:10PM
Alma is a girl's name. It comes from a Hebrew word "almah," which appears throughout the Hebrew OT. In the KJV it is translated as "maiden" or "virgin." In modern English we'd translate the word as "young woman."
However, a few years back, the Mopologists were pounding their chests over a find in an obscure Dead Sea scroll showing what they claimed was a Hebrew man named "Alma son of Judah." They even started calling it "the Alma scroll." This seemingly provided evidence that the name "Alma" could (somehow) have been gender-neutral.
I was researching this a bit deeper, and I found an article by a professor Norman Golb, which mentions this so-called "Alma scroll" almost in passing.
http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/dss_review_sandiego_catalogue_2007.pdf Golb has a Ph.D. in Judaic and Semitic studies from Johns Hopkins University and is a professor of Jewish History and Civilization at the University of Chicago.
In his paper, he mentions that the Mormons are getting their "evidence" from an old translation, done in 1962, which he calls a "pioneering" and "tentative" translation. Apparently, the scroll was revisited in 2002, and this time the name was translated as "Allima," an unrelated Aramaic name meaning “the strong one” (which makes a lot more sense than a man effectively named "Woman"). It appears that the mopologists have it wrong yet again.